The United Nations has said it is "extraordinarily concerned" about the situation in Sudan's Darfur region. Discussions have been taking place at the UN in New York about sending a major peacekeeping force there. UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown said "something very ugly was brewing" and the humanitarian and security situation was deteriorating. Britain and the US have introduced a UN draft resolution authorising deployment of at least 17,000 UN peacekeepers. With the attention of the world focused on the situation in Lebanon, UN officials are anxious not to lose sight of the on-going violence in Darfur, the BBC's Mike Sergeant reports from the UN in New York. Sudan's government and the pro-government Arab militias are accused of war crimes against the region's black African population, although the UN has stopped short of calling it genocide. More than 2m Sudanese have fled their homes and tens of thousands have been killed in the three-year conflict.... http://news.bbc.co.uk

Israeli aircraft fired several rockets at a Hizbollah stronghold in eastern Lebanon early on Saturday, a Lebanese security source said. Warplanes and helicopters attacked at dawn unidentified targets around the village of Bodai, west of the ancient city of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley. The source said Israeli commandos landed by helicopter in the area for a brief period. An Israeli army spokesman said the army was checking the report. Hizbollah television later reported its guerrillas clashed with Israeli commandos near Bodai and forced them to fly out under the cover of air strikes.The security source said the aircraft bombed roads leading to the village and a hillside to the west. Such an attack would be the first since a U.N. truce ended 34 days of fighting between Israeli forces and Hizbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon....http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060819/ts_nm/mideast_lebanon_attack_dc

Prosecutors dropped all charges against a pilot who crash-landed a vintage cargo plane on a residential Fort Lauderdale street last year, the pilot's attorney said Friday. Charles Riggs had faced charges of operating a plane in air commerce illegally and failing to file a customs declaration. The charges carried a total of up to $97,000 in fines, said Riggs' attorney, Chris Mancini. The World War II-era DC-3, which was headed to the Bahamas, experienced engine trouble after taking off from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport with a cargo of granite. Riggs escaped the burning wreckage with his co-pilot and passenger. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge James Cohn fined the company operating the plane $2,000 plus $125 dollars in court costs for failing to file a required customs form, said U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Kay. The company, Air Pony Express, Inc., is based in Fort Lauderdale. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2331850

Russia on Saturday handed over the body of a Japanese fisherman killed when one of its patrol boats shot at a crabbing vessel in disputed waters between the two countries, the Japanese foreign ministry said.Russia has expressed regret over Wednesday's incident, which was the first fatality in the decades-old territorial dispute in 50 years, but blamed the death on the Japanese side for intruding into Russian waters. A Japanese foreign ministry official was accompanying the body of Mitsuhiro Morita, 35, to a Japanese coast guard vessel docked on Kunashiri island for the return journey to Japan's northern island of Hokkaido, the foreign ministry said in a statement. She also held a brief meeting with the three surviving members of the fishing boat's crew, who have been detained since the shooting. A senior Japanese official said on Friday after talks in Moscow that Russia had promised to make "maximum effort" to free the three. ...http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2331844

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Friday blamed racism and government bureaucracy for hamstringing his city's ability to weather Hurricane Katrina and recover from the disaster that struck the Gulf Coast nearly a year ago. In remarks to the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Nagin said the hurricane “exposed the soft underbelly of America as it relates to dealing with race and class.” “And I, to this day, believe that if that would have happened in Orange County, California, if that would have happened in South Beach, Miami, it would have been a different response,” Nagin said. New Orleans was 60 percent black before Katrina struck Aug. 29. Early this year the mayor called on fellow blacks to again make New Orleans a “chocolate” city, but he later apologized. ...http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/18/national/main1913712.shtml?source=RSS&attr=U.S._1913712

In the week since British police conducted a major counterterrorism operation against an alleged plot to blow up airline flights between Britain and the US, a series of false alarms has shown how tense people have become about the threat of a terrorist attack in America. While all of the events were originally described, or considered, possible terrorist activities, none of them has been shown to have any connection with terrorism.The Washington Post reports that Seattle authorities evacuated dozens of workers and set up a half-mile perimeter around part of the city's port, after two sniffer dogs seemed to indicate that a container from Pakistan might contain explosives. Customs agents used a "gamma-ray" device at Terminal 18, south of downtown, to peer through the containers' steel walls, and detected items inside that did not match the containers' manifest, agency spokesman Mike Milne said....http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0817/dailyUpdate.html